Posts tagged “michael schrage”

Today is the 5th anniversary of the current US military involvement in Iraq. I heard Army Major General Mark Hertling speaking on NPR this week about helping members of Iraq’s central government figure out what people in the different provinces really want and need.

“We call it reverse helicopter governance – bringing the ministers to the provinces.”

This starts to sound a lot like the kinds of contextual research we use to inform product design. Going out and talking with users in their own environments. Seeing what people’s needs really are, rather than making assumptions.

There’s been a thorny debate in the Anthropology community about doing anthropological work in military contexts, but this is a different type of situation. Hertling is talking about facilitating Iraqi ministers to do contextual research on the people they are charged with serving as government officials.

What would it look like to take a further step, and take a design approach to creating a “user-centered government?”

One important aspect of design is a spirit of playfulness-in the sense of “serious play.” A spirit of willingness to reassess the meaning of a problem and the range of possible solutions. To prototype rapidly and try multiple approaches.

“…the real value of a model or simulation may stem less from its ability to test a hypothesis than from its power to generate useful surprise.”

Ideation and design processes have been used to solve some pretty complex problems. Steve wrote last year about introducing empathy and user-centered design into government. Participatory processes and contextual inquiry have become much more prevalent in development work.

What could be done to bring more of the spirit of serious play to bear on the ways that problems like civil and international conflicts are framed and addressed?

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If you build it, they will tell you what they think
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At the outset of the house-hunting process, one isadvised to make a list of requirements for the new home, such as number of bedrooms, neighborhood, size of yard, and so on. Of course, what is wonderful (and daunting) about this step is that for a purchase as important as a house, we may not know what we want (or don’t want) until we see it.

The process of going to Open Houses and visualizing ourlives and our stuff in that space is enormously powerful. We are, in effect, evaluating a prototype.

In this evaluation process we will decide whether we want to buy and live in the specific house we are visiting, but what else do we learn?

– confirmation of some of our earlier assumptions ("See, having a big backyard is crucial…")

– revision of earlier assumptions ("I guess if we had a shower like this I wouldn’t need to have a separate bathtub fixture…")

– removal or reprioritization of earlier assumptions ("I don’t have to have a side entrance…")

– new requirements for the future house ("Now that I see it, I would love an outdoor barbecue pit just like this one…")

To do this right, you’re going to talk about it. Out loud. And that means the people involved will negotiate these requirements over time, making them more detailed and more robust. In fact, the conversation will continueafter the encounter with the prototype is over. I hope
you see where I’m headed with this.

Earlier this year I was asked to show consumers a newhome electronics device that was being developed. Wewent to people’s homes with this…box. A big, ugly, weird-looking box. It was the result of clever engineers working with off-the-shelf parts to create an artifactthat could be experienced. In other words, it reallyworked.
It turned out to be the best possible prototype for theresearch. We explained to consumers that this was something they’d see in the future, but it wouldn’t look like this box. The box was so obviously a prototype that people easily understood that and framed their comments appropriately, offering up their needs and desires for this future technology.

I wouldn’t say we were "testing" this product. Rather, we used the box as a conversation starter. We got answers to the questions we had formulated ahead of time (i.e., importance of a proposed feature), and the
consumers we talked to gave us information in areas we hadn’t even thought about (i.e, not only that they wanted it installed, but how and where they would install it). As in the house-hunting example, we confirmed some of our earlier assumptions, revised others, removed others, and identified new requirements.

In this situation we had the right prototype for the type of learning we needed to do. Consider a similar session where the box itself doesn’t do much of anything but has a more realistic appearance. Then we might explore what part of the home it might best fit with, aesthetic issues, or what parts of the control panel people would expect to touch.

We can accomplish a lot by selecting the best sort of prototype to explore the right topics with a customer. The conventional wisdom seems to be that prototypes are made to best represent the current thinking about what the product will do/look like/etc. These prototypes arethe outputs of the typical product development process,and are not always appropriate for this type of study.But there are cool ways to explore different options with
customers.

In the house-hunting example, it wouldn’t be at allunreasonable to go look at a multi-million dollarhouse (although in the SF Bay Area, that just meansyou get a two-car garage – but seriously folks). A lot can be learned from the "prototype" even if it isn’t a literal example of what you might choose. In other words, there’s no way you’re buying that house, but as an extreme example, it can be very effective in revealing more of those unspoken assumptions,and clarifying the requirements. See, there’s real usefulness is being a Looky Lou!

In any product development activity there will always be
"outsider" ideas. Even though there are valid reasonsnot to take them all the way to market, those conceptscan be especially effective in sparking the type of customer dialog that we can really learn from. If people hate it, let’s discover why, and leverage that insight in the concepts we go forward with.
In addition to varying the "goodness" of the idea that
you prototype (as in, that’s not a "good" idea, but
let’s get people talking about it anyway), there is also
the realism (or "fidelity") in the way you prototype it.
We often use the phrases "looks-like" and "works-like"

but there’s more to it. Consider how to create layers of "fidelity." A plain box with no styling can have a nice color printout of a control panel right on top. Take a photograph of a person on a plane and put a cartoon product in their hand. There’s a lot to play with here. If you saw the (horrible) animated film Titan A.E., they made fairly effective use of layers of animation styles – cartoon faces inside stylized suits with photorealistic backgrounds.

And consider the dimensions of "fidelity". If you are concerned with the size of the product, you can use plain boxes of various sizes. There’s no need to create a variety of working, realistic designs if you are only concerned with
size (and be sure to bring along a too-small-to-engineer-
at-our-price-point box and a too-large-for-most-users box
and see what customers tell you, and why). Once, I saw an
engineer turn a bottle of orange soda into an excellent
prototype of color and finish. In the moment, it was the
best thing to get the customer to think about how, what,
and why.

If you’re interested in more, check out the work by Stephanie Houde and Charlie Hill. You can read a brief summary here, or see their chapter "What do Prototypes Prototype?" in the Handbook of Human Computer Interaction, 2nd edition, 1997.

And finally, Michael Schrage has written extensively on how organizations can and should create a "culture of prototyping. Check out this Fast Company article, or his book Serious Play.